17. Maggie
SEVENTEEN
maggie
Somehow, Delia always knew.
I guess it wasn’t like I was keeping it all that secret…she’d been at the bar with me, knew she was pushing me toward Nash, had been the one who got the text that said: Hey, not feeling well, going home. She’d reacted to it with a winking emoji.
And now she was blowing up my phone as I did the walk of shame back from Rick’s Bar, pretending I was just out for a stroll in a man’s t-shirt, as one does.
DELIA
tell me everything
right now
i want all the details
i want to know how many times he went down on you
i want to know how big his cock is
describe it
is he circumcised
maggie
maggie
MAGGIE
m a g g i e l a i n e
also i got a threesome out of this in case you were wondering. first time!
That was the thing that finally got me to respond, dialing her number instead of texting.
“A threesome?!” I said, instead of hello.
“Good morning to you too,” Delia said, sounding insufferably pleased with herself. “First time, as stated. Jake was very enthusiastic.”
“Jake and Connor?!”
“Jake and a lovely woman named Brianna who was also staying at the inn.” A pause. “Connor went home early, by the way. He figured out pretty quickly that you weren’t coming back.”
I winced. “I feel terrible about that.”
“Don’t. He was very gracious about it. Said and I quote—the bartender clearly had more of a claim.”
“Oh god.”
“He’s not wrong.” I could hear her smiling. “Now. Your turn. Walk of shame report, go.”
“I’m not doing a walk of shame,” I said. “I’m taking a morning stroll.”
“In Nash’s shirt?”
I looked down at myself. Then back up, frowning.
“How do you know what I’m wearing?” I asked.
Her voice dropped to a dramatic attempt at scary. “Because I’m right behind you.”
I whipped around and saw her car pulled over at the curb, Delia leaning out the window and waving at me with a cheerful smile.
She was also in last night’s clothes. Good for her.
“Are you stalking me?” I asked, putting my hands on my hips.
“No, you’re walking by the inn and I just left,” she said. “Get in so Mrs. Petersen doesn’t see you. She likes to hit the farmer’s market on Saturday mornings and it’s right around the corner.”
I sighed, but did as she said, walking over to the passenger side of her little sedan and climbing in. I immediately wrinkled my nose.
“You smell like…” I started, trailing off.
She gave me a mild smile. “Threesome?”
“You are truly ridiculous.”
“Oh baby,” she said. “I’m not the one who hooked up with my student’s hot older dad, am I? Glass houses and all that. Or should I say glass classroom…”
I shoved her gently, laughing despite myself. “You’re a horrible influence.”
“I was helpful,” she said. “You clearly wanted to have crazy good sex with Garrison Nash. I facilitated the crazy good sex by being a meddling pain in the ass.”
“Why do I feel like this isn’t the first time?”
She grinned. “Meddling pain in the ass just happened to be my nickname in high school.”
“Somehow that does not surprise me,” I said.
“It shouldn’t.” She pulled away from the curb, heading toward my apartment. It was only maybe a five-minute drive…but I was her captive now. “So—tell me everything. I meant that.”
I bit my lip. “Well…it was good.”
“Wow, descriptive.”
I rolled my eyes. “Really good.”
“I stand by what I said before.”
“Okay.” I took a long inhale. “Well…I asked him to put a baby in me.”
“Ooh…breeding kink, I like it,” she said. “I knew you were a freak at heart—”
“Then we had sex without a condom,” I went on.
Delia stopped oohing and aahing over it. Looked at me.
I looked back at her. “Then we talked. And he said he was going to spend the weekend um…spend the weekend making sure I get knocked up? And said he would stay, and made sure I actually wanted this—”
“And you do want it, right?” Delia asked.
We were parked in front of my building now, the car still running. I looked up at my apartment…realized I didn’t want to be alone. I wanted to go back to Nash, but we still needed to figure out what we were going to say to Nell.
“Do you need coffee?” I asked Delia. “I need more coffee.”
“God, yes,” she said. “I thought you’d never ask.”
She turned off the car and we went up to my apartment—a little two bedroom upstairs from the landlord’s place just off Main.
I put my bag down and went straight to the coffee pot while Delia looked around, taking in the houseplants and the old furniture and the bookshelves full of kids’ books I’d collected over the years.
“Your place is just as adorable as I expected,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said. “I think.”
“No, it really is.” She pulled one of my kids’ books off the shelf—The Very Hungry Caterpillar—and held it up. “You’ve been ready for this for a long time, haven’t you?”
I got the coffee started…the machine rumbling as it began to brew, the scent filling the apartment.
“I mean…yeah,” I said. “I guess I’ve just always figured I would be a mom, I’ve always loved kids—I thought I was going to do that with Bryce, it didn’t work out, then I met Nash and it just…clicked.”
Delia didn’t say anything—which was very unlike her. I looked back to find her peering at me, her head cocked, the book still in her hands.
“What?” I asked.
She slumped into a chair. “I don’t get it,” she said.
“I’m…lost.”
“I think I just—” She paused. “Casual sex, fine. Breeding kink and talking a big game about ‘put a baby in me’? Fantastic. But talking about it and actually doing it are a huge difference. Like…” She stopped again. “I want to be clear I’m not judging you.”
“Sounds like you’re about to judge me.”
“I’m not, I promise,” she said. “But normally you just—there’s an order they tell you, right?
Date, fall in love, maybe live together, get married, then babies.
And you just…you skipped all the steps with a man who’s great in bed who you hardly know, and you’re perfectly fine with that?
I guess I’m just making sure you’re okay. ”
I leaned back against the counter beside the coffee pot and crossed my arms. “Are your parents still together?” I asked.
Delia’s lips parted like this had just occurred to her. “Oh…yeah. They are. Forty years and counting.”
“Well, mine are divorced,” I said. “And they followed all the steps, had me—turned out they didn’t like each other and they didn’t like kids either.
Delia was quiet.
“So the steps didn’t protect them,” I said.
“And they didn’t protect me either—I did the steps with Bryce.
Five years of doing it right. And he still called me from Boston and ended it and I ended up crying in a bar I’d never been to before.
” I paused. “The steps are just…steps. They don’t actually guarantee anything. ”
“That’s fair,” Delia said quietly.
“Nash isn’t Bryce,” I said. “He’s not my dad.
He’s not someone who followed all the steps and then decided he didn’t want it anymore.
He’s someone who has been showing up for his daughter every single day for five years without any steps at all, just—because she’s his and he loves her.
” I looked at my hands. “When I saw that I just thought—oh. That’s what I want.
That’s the thing I’ve been waiting for.”
Delia was very still.
“And the baby thing,” I said. “I know it’s fast. I know it looks insane from the outside.
But I’ve wanted to be a mom since I was eight years old and raising Lucas.
That wanting didn’t start with Nash. It’s just—he’s the person I want to do it with.
And he wants it too. And we’re both adults who made a clear decision. ”
Silence.
“Okay,” Delia said finally. Soft and genuine. “Okay, I get it.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” She nodded. “So how can I help?”
I laughed awkwardly, bringing over a cup of coffee for her, keeping mine on the counter. “Not sure you can really help me get pregnant…”
“No, silly,” she laughed too. “I mean—admin-wise. At school. With Mrs. Petersen and Principle Daniels and…everyone else on the clown car.”
“Oh god,” I said. “I hadn’t even thought about that.”
“I have,” Delia said, taking her coffee. She wrinkled her nose. “You have any creamer?”
“Fridge,” I said. “Hope milk works, I take mine black.”
“Gross.” She stood and grabbed the milk, then stirred some in.
“Anyway…you should be thinking about this, because I sit in the office every day and I see everything, and I can tell you Mrs. Petersen is already onto you. That woman is obsessed with your future baby-daddy—or, boyfriend? Is he your boyfriend?”
“I guess,” I said. “But—rewind. She already knows?”
“I just get a vibe, but you might want to prepare since like…you could already be pregnant.”
“No way,” I said, shaking my head. “It doesn’t work that way.”
“All it takes is once,” she shrugged. “And it sounds like you did it a few times…with a guy who has proven to be very fertile. Are you on birth control?”
“No.”
“So you could be pregnant right now, Maggie.” Delia’s eyes darted down to his t-shirt. “Actually…I was gonna say your boobs look bigger. What if you got pregnant that first time?”
“We used a condom.”
“He used a condom with Nell’s mom too, right?”
I went very still.
Delia looked at me.
“We used a condom,” I said again, like that would give me more time.
“Condoms aren’t a hundred percent,” she said.
“Which would mean I could have been pregnant since September,” I said.
The word sat there between us.
Delia put her coffee down very carefully.
“The first night,” I said. “At Rick’s. When I didn’t know he owned the place and I just—walked in because the light was on.”
“Mmhm.” Delia nodded.
I looked at the second bedroom door.
I’d moved here for a life I was building for two…
with the promise of three. I’d bought the furniture, made the space, told myself there was time.
I’d been living alone in this apartment for three months with the extra room full of boxes I hadn’t unpacked yet because some part of me had been waiting to know what it was going to be.
“If it was the first night,” I said slowly, “I’d be almost five weeks along.”
Silence.
“We need to go to the pharmacy,” I said.
Delia was already standing up.
“I need creamer anyway,” she said. “You should keep that on hand from now on—I have a feeling I’m going to be hanging around here a lot more if we’re making plans for your kid.”